[notahacker]

The evidence for the real profit margins being in the customer facing bit isn't strongly supported by the current market being so competitive that the companies run at VC-subsidised operating losses in most markets whilst fighting endless legal battles. If the secret sauce that changes all that is the self driving tech, the profit remains all in that. Ride locating software is relatively straightforward for a company with Alphabet's resources to develop, the business side less so, especially when its core businesses are notoriously poor at customer service and making far too much money from an existing search near-monopoly to want to risk attracting complaints about anti-competitive behaviour in new markets. And they could still can collect all that juicy data if other entities paid them enormous licence fees to run the consumer facing bit of an autonomous vehicle operation, maintain the vehicles, obtain permits in 1001 jurisdictions and design cars and ownership models to consumer preferences

Unique, regulated and highly complex software and hardware components seems far less likely to become commoditized than ridesharing apps that essentially already are, and of course viable markets for the driving tech exists even if the driver can't be dispensed with altogether.